I study how people and places continually shape one another — and how to measure that relationship computationally.
My work spans multiple scales: from the developmental onset of place-based identity to large-scale cultural patterns shaped by geography, soil, and mobility. During my doctoral research at The New School for Social Research, I introduced the concept of placefulness — the degree to which people's sense of self is tied to specific environments — along with a harmonic-mean measure of residential stability that predicts identity, prosocial behavior, and memory structures beyond what conventional mobility metrics capture. Evidence includes studies with more than 1,400 individuals in Japan and the United States.
As a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia Business School (Michael Morris Lab), I now extend this approach to organizations. Using Contextualized Construct Representations (CCR), I treat organizations as synthetic participants in psychological measurement — administering validated psychometric instruments to their public texts to generate behavioral profiles across 50+ dimensions. Applied to 2,260 U.S. firms, this method predicts DOJ criminal prosecutions with a leave-one-out AUC of 0.952.
I am also the founder of Stronglight Inc., where I translate behavioral science into products — a double-blind hiring platform that replaces resumes with non-verbal behavioral games, generating time-invariant, culture-agnostic behavioral signatures for person-role matching.
Environments don't merely surround us — they participate in making us who we are. Through ongoing international collaborations, I extend this lens to show how variations in ecological frictions and affordances unlock creativity, adaptation, and resilience.
I welcome collaboration and dialogue.